My Experience Of Dreams:1953-2007


In The Baha’i Holy Year 1992-1993 I began to collect my dream experiences. That Holy Year was, as the Universal House of Justice stated, "an opportunity…for inner reflection on the part of the soul." My dreams before 1992 had virtually disappeared from my memory except for perhaps six major dreams and dream sequences going back to the beginning of my Baha'i life in the year 1953. In 1992 I also started collecting notes and photocopies from various sources, from commentators on dreams and dream-theory, from essays on dreams. I also read the occasional book that was relevant to the search into my dreams and their meaning. I did not approach the topic as systematically as Dr. John Davidson did in the 1990s when he taught a course on the study of dreams at the University of Tasmania.

After 15 years of recording some of my dreams, keeping notes on dreams and writing a succinct summary of the previous thirty-nine years of my dream life(1953-1992), I have established a base of understanding, a base for the integration of my dreams into my autobiography, to the extent that that is possible. This essay is an attempt at an overview, an understanding, an adequacy of perspective, a context to begin an examination of fundamental questions vis-a-vis my dream life. This essay is also intended as a stimulus to others to examine their dream life more fully.

What I will actually do with this initial examination, this initial elaboration, of my understandings and those of others I have drawn on is a question yet to be worked out. Whatever I "do," it will probably evolve over time, if it evolves at all. Perhaps I have already made a start with some of my poems that allude as they often do to dreams and my dream life. Three of these poems can be found in my two-ring binder on Dreams, but I have not included them here in this introductory essay. Future essays may go into these dream questions and issues more fully.

It has been more than a century since Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams(1900) and, of course, the history of dreams in western civilization goes back to both the Greeks and the Hebrews, inter alia. The animist religious tradition that existed for thousands of years also has a rich dream experience, but I do not go into that here. It is not my purpose here to go into this the history of dreams. Freud said that dreams were the royal road to one’s inner life, but there is a tangle of thought and feeling in dreams and so that royal road is not a straight and simple path. Jung said he was helped to overcome the egotism inherent in autobiography and in life by the dream process. He also felt dreams helped us contact the shadow self. Adler, in contrast, saw dreams as the antithesis of common sense and reality, indeed, as their arch-enemies. Our life-style often gets out of touch with reality and common sense and dreams can help us see this unreality in context, Adler went on.

Scientifically-minded people seldom dream it is said. This hard-nosed realism, as an approach to dreams, stands as a sharp contrast to many of the other interpretations that see dreams as glimpses of immortality, fragments of a fable, an archetype, etcetera. For that reason I find this realism attractive as an interpretive system or non-system. A famous quotation from Shakespeare in which he refers to them as "the children of idle brains,"supports this view.

This is not all. The literature on the subject of dreams is now burgeoning. It is not my intention to even provide a cursory overview of that material, not here in this essay nor elsewhere. I feel there is potential in the dream world, a potential I have scarcely fathomed after this dozen years of study and analysis. Brian Finney says that dreams arouse "expectations of significance that remain unfulfilled because of their private and indirect nature." The many pages of my file will reveal some of these expectations and some of my radical departures from common sense and reality, throwing light, I trust, on this autobiography.

I find, too, many of the quotations and articles now available on this subject from various sources relevant to my understanding and experience of dreams. I read them from time to time when I am trying to sort out a dream and its meaning. The literature now is, as I say above, burgeoning. In the last four years, 2003-2007, I have begun to accummulate a collection of such articles in my Dream file.

In my twenty years of dream description(1987-2007)(2) and fifteen years of study and analysis(1992-2007) it would seem I do not often come out of my dream world with my pen in hand. Only when there is some leftover affect that stays in my mind on waking, perhaps three times a year at the most, on average. In the eight years since coming to Tasmania, 1999 to 2007, and retiring from from time work, I have made 27 entries or about three a year. After all the 20 years of writing accounts of my dreams I have recorded only sixteen pages of written and typed notes, about 4/5th’s of a page per year.

If I use the time period 1953 to 2007, fifty-four years, I have about one page every three to four years, 140 words a year, 15 a month, 4 a week and, arguably, one word a day. This is hardly as extensive treatment of my dream life. Like most people, I find dreams come and go and, unless one is especially keen on the subject, the study of one’s dream life remains peripheral.

I hope this brief essay and the material which is set out in my Dream file, although not included here, will be of use to whomever comes upon it. It is certainly of use to me periodically as I begin these years of retirement and a more serious study of the field of dreams in these first years of my late adulthood. It provides a pleasurable resource from time to time as I play with the stuff of my dreams as it slips into my waking life from REM and non-REM sleep. REM sleep was discovered in 1953. This was the first empirical breakthrough, or so I understand it, in dream science.

1953 was a significant year, with the Kingdom of God beginning as it did that year, from a Baha'i perspective. Of course in the more than half a century since then(1953-2007), there has been a vast increase in the empirical study of dreams, sleep and the associated issues and problems. But it is not my intention here to dwell on this burgeoning literature, the problems of sleep or, indeed, most of the issues that have emerged in the study of dreams. This file is more of a personal retrospective, so to speak. Perhaps in a future, a follow-up, essay on the subject I will widen the ambit of my study.

As 'Abdu'l-Baha says "a most wonderful and thrilling motion appeared in the world of existence in that year, 1953, mirabile dictu. Let it be seen what breakthroughs and insights appear in the years of my late adulthood and old age from the further study of dreams and from the development of the Baha’i Faith with which I have been associated over that same half century.